A landscape of big, restful lines with a background of dark-shadowed mountain forests, against which all I have to object is that they wall in the whole horizon. From this range of darkening blue heights the country sinks in undulating tiers of hills to the plain of the foreground. Here the idyll of the seasons and men’s lives is developed in three pictures. First, amidst the laughing spring, a strapping maiden, intoxicated with love, on the breast of the young lad who is embracing her. Next, a number of stalwart country folk in the summer work of haymaking, on whom, beyond the cut grass, their wives and children at play are gazing. Lastly, under melancholy autumn trees, a lonely old woman preoccupied with recollections. The people are homely, of course, without crude realism, poetic without the shepherd-insipidity of Gessner. The parallelism between the aging of the men and women and the progress of the year is unforced; the symbolism clear and free from morbid, perverse mysticism. Turf, trees, and bushes are decorative in form, delicate, and at the same time sufficient in colour, and the whole is flooded by a wonderfully joyous sunshine, which is more reminiscent of the glories of May in Provence than even Montenard’s symphonies of light. Henri Martin has, I admit, here, too, indulged in stippling, but he has given his people and trees strong, free outlines, and scarred only the outer skin very lightly with pock-marks. He has not abandoned that ill habit, but he seems to practise it with remorse. Perhaps he thinks gradual transition is due to his conversion to better insight. In any case, this picture was conceived and executed in a happy moment. Henri Martin’s career teaches a moral. Let him who would honour an artist continually bear in mind an appropriately modified reading of Solon’s warning to Crœsus: “Do not pronounce on any artist before his death.”